Tom Rickhoff first Republican elected to countywide courthouse office

On November 6, Gilbert Garcia’s column discussed the Republican Rickhoff brothers, Tom and Gerry, and their accumulated 14 wins in 15 local races.

The column describes how it started with “Tom Rickhoff’s barrier-busting 1978 win in the district clerk race (the first countywide win for a Bexar County Republican since Reconstruction.”

This photo from the Express-News files shows Tom Rickhoff being sworn into office by his father, Circuit Judge John Rickhoff, according to the information written on the back of the print:

Tom Rickhoff had been selected by Republicans to run against long-time District Clerk Elton Cude after their initial candidate withdrew. He was a former U.S. Attorney who worked for the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Strike Force. The Express reported in June 1978 that after working in the “relatively clean” federal system, he “was shocked to discover the political activity in the courthouse.”

Rickhoff said “on my first visit to the district clerk’s office, [I] was asked to purchase several tickets to a Cude for Clerk campaign party.” His campaign was then built on the promise to “never use the county employees as personal minions and campaign workers.”

Cude, who had been in office since 1967, was seen as vulnerable after narrowly winning the Democratic primary over a relatively unknown opponent. He had also been arrested in May for resisting arrest after a disturbance outside his campaign headquarters. Cude had accused Rickhoff of running a dirty campaign and denied using his employees to campaign for him while on the job.

The Express reported on Nov. 8, 1978, that Rickhoff held slim leads through most of the evening and had won the absentee ballots. Cude took a 1,000-vote lead before Rickhoff definitively took the lead as “votes from the North Side came in.”

Garcia’s column also mentioned Gerry Rickhoff’s unseating of incumbent County Clerk Bob Green in 1994. I pulled a related article for my colleagues at ExpressNews.com, and it can be viewed there in an occasional feature for subscribers called “From the Archives.”